On Monday morning I trashed my treasures. The Macintosh LC with its 40MB hard drive and Motorola 68020 processor (blazing 25 MHz speed!) was the first to go. It had cost over $2,000, which back in 1990 was real money. But after ten years of collecting dust and spider webs in the garage, its day had come. Next to the curb was its successor, the Powertower Pro, a 1996 Macintosh clone also bought for $2,000. Its 604e chip and 96 MB of RAM---later upgraded to 512 MB---lasted for eight years, growing increasingly creaky under the weight of bloated software and graphics-rich web pages. The switch from dial-up to DSL was the tipping point, and in early 2005 the Powertower Pro went dark.
Also tossed on the heap were cellphones, handheld games, a monitor, batteries, cables, scanners, modems, printers, and a 25-year-old TV. The hard disk drives required special handling because they contained some financial and personal information. I removed them from the chassis after much unscrewing, tugging, pulling, and expletiving (I forgot how much trouble it used to be to disassemble computers).
The youngster drilled holes in the drives and bashed them with a hammer for good measure. Usually he’s not too keen to help, but he took to this mission with enthusiasm. It appears that he has some talent in the art of destruction; well, not everyone can be an inventor or creator.
I stapled the filled-out green recycling form to the box. The companions with whom I spent a good part of my life were gone by 9 a.m. But sadness passed quickly. They never showed me any love in return. © 2008 Stephen Yuen
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